Abortion Doesn’t Aid in Female Liberation

One of the biggest reasons for allowing abortion is the belief that it somehow helps in the general women’s liberation, specifically in female sexual liberation. By allowing abortion, so the argument goes, it gives a woman complete rights over her reproductive system, which gives her full liberation. It doesn’t matter what the woman chooses, so long as she has a choice. There are, of course, multiple problems with this view:

#1 – It assumes that women (or men for that matter) have an autonomous right over their own bodies.

This way of thinking assumes too much – it assumes that we can do whatever we want to our bodies without having a communal consequence. However, there are times where what I do to my body will inevitably affect those around me (i.e. if I inject myself with an airborne disease, because it will harm those around me I do not have the right to do such a thing). Almost everyone would argue that if we take an action against our body that negatively affects others, that action shouldn’t be taken.

In this case, the child in the womb is ontologically separate from the mother, though reliant. That is to say, the child really isn’t part of the mother’s body. The mother plays host to the body. If a guest comes into your house, eats your food, drinks your water, and sleeps in your bed, does that guest belong to you? Of course not – the guest, though reliant upon you, is not a part of who you are.

Often times, the counter to the above argument is that the child is still located within the mother and therefore a part of her body. This is true, but completely irrelevant. No female can spontaneously produce a child without any fertilization from a male. This means that the baby isn’t entirely made up of the mother’s cells, which would seem to indicate that the child in the womb isn’t really part of the mother’s body (in the same way an arm, heart, or lung is part of the mother’s body).

All of this means that the child growing within the mother is really a body inside a body and not just an extension of the mother’s body. It contains foreign matter (via sperm) that is not natural to the mother’s body. If that is true, an abortion is an act that is taken out on the mother’s body that severely affects the child (through death). This would mean that abortion is highly immoral since it is a selfish action that harms an innocent party.

Even in a case where the mother and child have the same DNA (such as cloning), the child will still have an individual personality. In fact, though the DNA is the same as the mothers, it is still unique in that the child’s DNA will cause the child to adapt to certain situations different. We are still dealing with an individual human being in the womb.

A woman who has an abortion is often given a social stigma – she’s considered selfish, unprepared, promiscuous, a horrible person, etc. Though I am against character assassination and think Christian should do everything they can to restore a mother who has had an abortion, it doesn’t change the fact that certain social stigmas do exist and will always exist.

The HBO show (and now movie) Sex and the City attempted to change social views of women and sex, that it’s okay for women to have multiple partners and still be successful. Unfortunately, among most Americans the show didn’t do anything to change the social view of promiscuous women. Though it is sadly accepted that men and women will have multiple partners, it is still looked down upon by most aspects of society.

If something less severe – sex with multiple partners – has a societal view that has not changed, what can we conclude for abortion? Abortion still comes with a strict stereotype that actually harms women’s liberation. For women to be truly liberated they would need to avoid social stereotyping in a negative manner, but abortion doesn’t accomplish this at all.

#3 – This version of women’s liberation isn’t just political, but goes against the design of nature.

For whatever reason, women have been designed to birth children. Though this is not their sole purpose, sole design, or even main purpose or design, there is no denying that the female body was given the honor of being the host of human life. In modern culture this honor has been viewed as a curse.

There is no changing the course of what is natural – women, for whatever reason, have been picked to bear children. The problem is that our culture has somehow deemed this act as “lesser” than the acts of men in the work place. Our culture somehow assumes that by forcing a woman to carry a baby instead of aborting the child for her own reasons (other than medical), we are forcing the woman into a lower status in society.

This, however, is absurd. Though our culture puts a higher value on high paying and high profile jobs, this doesn’t necessarily mean that such jobs are really all that valuable. Being a Christian I believe that all vocations are equal (assuming the vocation is not inherently sinful), but if I were to place a hierarchy on vocations then the vocation of being a mother would top the list. There is a bond between children and mothers that runs deep. Is being a CEO or successful lawyer really worth breaking that bond (I would also argue that men who work 40 hours a week and ignore their vocation as a father are also missing out on their natural calling and destroying the bond between father and child – our American culture simply works too much)?

What is more liberating then doing what we have been called to do? This is not to say that every woman is called to be a mother – even if a woman has children this does not mean her sole purpose in life is to stay at home and raise these children. What I am arguing, however, is that pregnancy is natural and by saying abortion helps in the liberation of women, it is essentially saying that abortion helps liberate women from nature – which is completely off the wall.

The bottom line for the entire situation is that abortion really doesn’t help in women’s liberation. Having a child doesn’t lower a woman or make her subservient to a man – it is simply a natural process. How is it liberating to go against what is natural?

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2 comments

You have got to sharpen up your thinking to make real headway on this issue. You seem so confident when you write the words ‘design,’ ‘nature’, etc.

Let’s just say that you, dear blogger, DONT KNOW what is ‘intended’ by nature. Does Nature? Who knows.

Females are defined by reproductive machinery, ok?

Let’s start with a few simple observations.

‘Natural’ doesn’t equate to ‘good.’ There are things that are natural and good like eyesight, there are things that are natural and bad like cancer. There are unnatural things like blood transfusions that are good, and there are unnatural things that are bad, like ultra-high concentrations of dioxins in our rivers.

My usage of good and bad are already problematic, but let’s assume that they’re decent first starts. There’s no way to talk otherwise, if we say a hammer can be used for good and bad, because there’s nowhere to go from there.

God can let or cause a church roof to fall in on his worshippers, and if this is natural and good, I don’t know how to argue with such a moral monstrosity, so let’s leave God’s will out of it because it too makes moral debate impossible.

There’s so much wrong and sloppy here it’s hard to rebut it. Where to start?

But one starting point is what I’ve just written – and for the author to reboot this issue and try to slow down and think it through.

Abortion is not ‘really’ emancipatory? Try and tell that to the woman who has been raped and is forced by do-gooders to bear that child. Try to tell someone who has to raise a child alone and struggles for decades to pay the bills and worry and despair over raising a kid in terrible circumstances. Try and tell the damaged child who has grown up that they are ‘free’ to be whoever they want and to ignore the deprivations they grew up with, that they didn’t have a father?

You say that my argumentation is sloppy and terrible, but you really don’t show how. The only argument you bring forth is that just because something is natural, that doesn’t mean it’s good. Granted, but that’s not what I was arguing. Pregnancy is a natural consequence to an action, but that consequence produces human life. Thus, if human life is good, then the natural outcome of sex in some cases (pregnancy) is inherently good because it produces a human life. To compare the fetus to cancer is to devalue human life and say we are no better than cancer.

Regardless, it’s very easy to tell that pregnancy is something natural that is good. For something to qualify as “natural” in the philosophic sense, it must be functioning properly or must not place a human life in immanent danger; for it to be good, it must follow the latter. Thus, cancer functions properly, but places a human life in immanent danger; cancer is natural, but not good. A pregnancy that is properly functioning does not place the mother’s life in any danger, thus it is good (as it produces a human life).

Secondly, you would have to explain why the natural occurrence of pregnancy is bad. To do this however, you’d have to show how it is negative in ALL circumstances. This can’t be subjective, which would be arbitrary. If a pregnancy, which is natural, isn’t good, then it is bad.

As for the last parts of your arguments, I would say they’re irrelevant: See my post here.